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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > General
Biologists and anthropologists in Japan have played a crucial role in the development of primatology as a scientific discipline. Publication of Primate Origins of Human Cognition and Behavior under the editorship of Tetsuro Matsuzawa reaffirms the pervasive and creative role played by the intellectual descendants of Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani in the fields of behavioral ecology, psychology, and cognitive science. Matsuzawa and his colleagues-humans and other primate partners- explore a broad range of issues including the phylogeny of perception and cognition; the origin of human speech; learning and memory; recognition of self, others, and species; society and social interaction; and culture. With data from field and laboratory studies of more than 90 primate species and of more than 50 years of long-term research, the intellectual breadth represented in this volume makes it a major contribution to comparative cognitive science and to current views on the origin of the mind and behavior of humans.
The world perceived at the visual level is constituted not by
objects or static forms, but by processes appearing imbued with
meaning. As G. Kanizsa stated, at the visual level the line per se
does not exist: only the line which enters, goes behind, divides,
etc., a line evolving according to a precise holistic context, in
comparison with which function and meaning are indissolubly
interlinked. Just as the meaning of words is connected with a
universe of highly-dynamic functions and functional processes which
operate syntheses, cancellations, integrations, etc. (a universe
which can only be described in terms of symbolic dynamics), in the
same way, at the level of vision, we must continuously unravel and
construct schemata; we must assimilate and make ourselves available
for selection by the co-ordinated information penetrating from
external Reality. Lastly, we must interrelate all this with the
internal selection mechanisms through a precise "journey" into the
regions of intensionality.
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy,
have over the past century emerged as core topics of empirical
investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of
cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive
neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be
included in early textbooks on the science of cognition, the study
of thinking and reasoning has since taken off, brancing off in a
distinct direction from the field from which it originated.
Critical-thinking skills are essential for life in the 21st century. In this follow-up to his introductory guide Think, and continuing his trademark of hopeful skepticism, Guy Harrison demonstrates in a detailed fashion how to sort through bad ideas, unfounded claims, and bogus information to drill down to the most salient facts. By explaining how the human brain works, and outing its most irrational processes, this book provides the thinking tools that will help you make better decisions, ask the right questions (at the right time), know what to look for when evaluating information, and understand how your own brain subconsciously clouds your judgment. Think you're too smart to be easily misled? Harrison summarizes scientific research showing how easily even intelligent and well-educated people can be fooled. We all suffer from cognitive biases, embellished memories, and the tendency to kowtow to authority figures or be duped by dubious 'truths' packaged in appealing stories. And as primates we are naturally status seekers, so we are prone to irrational beliefs that seem to enhance our sense of belonging and ranking. Emotional impulses and stress also all too often lead us into traps of misperception and bad judgment. Understanding what science has discovered about the brain makes you better equipped to cope with its built-in pitfalls. Good Thinking--the book and the practice-- makes clear that with knowledge and the right thinking skills, anyone can lead a safer, wiser, more efficient, and productive life.
The book focuses on a conceptual flaw in contemporary artificial
intelligence and cognitive science. Many people have discovered
diverse manifestations and facets of this flaw, but the central
conceptual impasse is at best only partially perceived. Its
consequences, nevertheless, visit themselves as The impasse concerns a presupposition concerning the nature of
representation - that all representation has the nature of
encodings: encodingism. Encodings certainly exist, but The impasse and its consequences - and steps away from that impasse - are explored in a large number of projects and approaches. These include SOAR, CYC, PDP, situated cognition, subsumption architecture robotics, and the frame problems - a general survey of the current research in AI and Cognitive Science emerges. Interactivism, an alternative model of representation, is
proposed and examined.
Wagman presents a general, unified theory of artificial and human intelligence under which the nature of human reasoning, problem solving, analogical thinking, and scientific discovery is examined from theoretical, research and computational perspectives. The work analyzes foundational issues regarding the nature of intelligent systems and intelligence, and significant and current research in the area is discussed. This book will be of interest to scholars dealing with psychology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
The chapters in this volume are the result of a series of Cognitive Sciences Workshops held at McGill University. Each workshop was organized around a different theme and each of these topics is represented in the volume: language acquisition and development; text and text processing; computer chess; grammars, parsers, and language comprehension; scientific reasoning and problem solving; language and the brain; and semantics. The topics are approached from the perspectives of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and neurology.
This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition (externalism, mental causation, resemblance, habits, sensory awareness, the psychology, illusion, representationalism), concepts (universal, transcendental, identity, syncategorematic), logic and language (definitions, syllogisms, modality, supposition, obligationes, etc.), action theory (belief, will, action), and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio's former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.
Does the brain create the mind, or is some external entity
involved? In addressing this "hard problem" of consciousness, we
face a central human challenge: what do we really know and how do
we know it? Tentative answers in this book follow from a synthesis
of profound ideas, borrowed from philosophy, religion, politics,
economics, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and cosmology, the
knowledge structures supporting our meager grasps of reality. This
search for new links in the web of human knowledge extends in many
directions: the "shadows" of our thought processes revealed by
brain imagining, brains treated as complex adaptive systems that
reveal fractal-like behavior in the brain's nested hierarchy,
resonant interactions facilitating functional connections in brain
tissue, probability and entropy as measures of human ignorance,
fundamental limits on human knowledge, and the central role played
by information in both brains and physical systems.
This book, which gathers in one place the theories of 10 leading
cognitive and functional linguists, represents a new approach that
may define the next era in the history of psychology: It promises
to give psychologists a new appreciation of what this variety of
linguistics can offer their study of language and communication. In
addition, it provides cognitive-functional linguists new models for
presenting their work to audiences outside the boundaries of
traditional linguistics. Thus, it serves as an excellent text for
courses in psycholinguistics, and appeal to students and
researchers in cognitive science and functional linguistics.
This book, which gathers in one place the theories of 10 leading
cognitive and functional linguists, represents a new approach that
may define the next era in the history of psychology: It promises
to give psychologists a new appreciation of what this variety of
linguistics can offer their study of language and communication. In
addition, it provides cognitive-functional linguists new models for
presenting their work to audiences outside the boundaries of
traditional linguistics. Thus, it serves as an excellent text for
courses in psycholinguistics, and appeal to students and
researchers in cognitive science and functional linguistics.
organizing committee: Paul Werbos, Chairman, National Science Foundation Harold Szu, Naval Surface Warfare Center Bernard Widrow, Stanford University Centered around 20 major topic areas of both theoretical and practical importance, the World Congress on Neural Networks provides its registrants -- from a diverse background encompassing industry, academia, and government -- with the latest research and applications in the neural network field.
In our high technology society, there is a growing demand for a better understanding of decision making in high risk situations in order to improve selection, training and operational performance. Decision Making Under Stress presents a state-of-the-art review of psychological theory, in research and practice, on decision making in high pressure and emergency situations. It focuses on the experienced decision makers who deal with such risks, principally on flight decks, at civil emergencies, in industrial settings and military environments. The 29 chapters cover a wide range of perspectives and applications from aviation, military, industry and the emergency services. The authors, all international invited experts in their field, are based in research centers and universities from Europe, North America and Australia. Their common interest is in the theories and methods of a new research domain called NDM (naturalistic decision making). This volume comprises the edited contributions to the Third International NDM conference, sponsored by the US Army Research Institute and the US Naval Air Warfare Center, which was held in Aberdeen, Scotland in September 1996. The NDM researchers are interested in decision making in situations characterised by high risk, time pressure, uncertain goals, ambiguous information and teamwork. The extent to which the NDM approach can explain and predict human performance in such settings is a central theme, discussed with many practical examples and applications. This book is essential reading for applied psychologists, pilots, emergency commanders, military officers, high hazard managers, safety and emergency response professionals.
An earlier book by Rodrick Wallace entitled Consciousness: A Mathematical Treatment of the Global Neuronal Workspace Model, introduced a formal information-theoretic approach to individual consciousness implementing approaches developed previously by the cognitive scientist Bernard Baars and the philosopher Fred Dretske. This book takes a more formal 'groupoid' perspective and generalizes the results of that book to processes of 'distributed cognition' characteristic of large institutions that can entertain several, sometimes many, simultaneous 'global workspaces' which must compete for resources while communicating and cooperating. Equivalence classes of 'states' produce a network of language-analogs characterizing interacting cognitive modules which entertain multiple workspaces. Equivalence classes of these language-analogs produce dynamical manifolds describing temporal processes carried out by multiple-workspace institutions.
urrently a paradigm shift is occurring in for the conventional understanding of represen- which the traditional view of the brain as tions. The paper also summarizes the rationale for C representing the "things of the world" is the selection of contributions to this volume, which challenged in several respects. The present volume will roughly proceed from relatively "realist" c- is placed at the edge of this transition. Based on the ceptions of representation to more "constructivist" 1997 conference "New Trends in Cognitive Sci- interpretations. The final chapter of discussions, ence" in Vienna, Austria, it tries to collect and in- taped during and at the end of the conference, p- grate evidence from various disciplines such as p- vides the reader with the possibility to reflect upon losophy of science, neuroscience, computational the different approaches and thus contributes to b- approaches, psychology, semiotics, evolutionary ter and more integrative understanding of their biology, social psychology etc. , to foster a new thoughts and ideas. understanding of representation. The subjective experience of an outside world This book has a truly interdisciplinary character. It seems to suggest a mapping process where environ- is presented in a form that is readily accessible to mental entities are projected into our mind via some professionals and students alike across the cognitive kind of transmission. While a profound critique of sciences such as neuroscience, computer science, this idea is nearly as old as philosophy, it has gained philosophy, psychology, and sociology.
What role does justice play in the formation of public opinion and the scholarly debates about social problems? Does the perception of injustice force problems to appear on the political agenda? Does the perception of an injustice give momentum to social change? Or are violations of self-interest or threats to one's material welfare the more important factors? Or are empathy-driven concerns for the needy and the disadvan taged motivations to solve societal problems? What is known about the role justice concerns play in leadership? In several chapters of this volume, justice concerns and justice motives are viewed in relation to other concerns and motivations; welfare, self-interest, altruism. It is argued that the consensus of political theorists converges on mutual advantage as the main criterion of acceptable solutions to solving socie tal problems. In economics, self-interest is considered the driving force and provides the criterion of acceptable solutions. Sociological and social psychological exchange theories share these basic assumptions. Thus, questions are raised and answered concerning how justice and these other important motives appear in the analyses of societal prob lems and the search for solutions. Moreover, in addition to the issue of conflicting motives-self interest, altruism, justice-it is commonly recognized that the definition of what is just and what is unjust is open to question. In public as well as in scientific dialogues, diverging views about justice have to be integrated or decided upon."
This volume of Advances in Clinical Child Psychology is the third under our editorship and the seventeenth of the series. It continues the tradition of examining a broad range of topics and issues related to the study and treatment of child and adolescent behavior problems. Over the years, the series has served to identify important and exciting new developments in the field and provide scholarly review of current thought and practices. In the openingchapter, Cichetti, Toth, and Lynch examine attachment theory and its implications for psychopathology. They provide exacting commentary on the status of the construct of attachment and its potential role in the development of diverse psychopathologies. Similarly, Richards explores the impact of infant cognitive psychophysiology and its role in normal and abnormal development in the second chapter. Both of these chapters address issues of risk for subsequent psychopathology and are deeply embedded in developmental theory. In Chapter 3/ Nottelmann and Jensen tackle the important issue of comorbidity in psychiatric diagnosis from a developmental perspective.
Is repressed memory fact or fiction? What role should therapists play in determining the truth? What, if any, weight should these 'memories' be given when prosecuting claims of child sexual abuse? Noted experts seek answers that could affect thousands of lives. Tabloid talk shows and the courts are overflowing with adults alleging sexual and other abuses they endured as children. Parents have been hauled into court, convicted, and jailed over their children's claims of abuse, many of which have been based upon 'memories' that have surfaced after therapists employed dubious techniques and suggestive 'therapies'. In some cases, the abuse really did occur. Alarmingly, in other cases, it did not. Noted psychologist and author Robert A Baker states that experienced and responsible therapists vehemently disagree about the nature, source, and reliability of these 'memories'. In this book, doctors, therapists, victims, researchers, and others search for answers in seven major areas: memory and its recovery, childhood trauma, repression and amnesia, hypnosis, suggestibility, professional problems and ethical issues, as well as needed research and legal implications. Distinguished contributors include Maggie Bruck, Stephen J Ceci, Gail Goodman, James Hudson, John F Kihlstrom, Elizabeth Loftus, Richard Ofshe, Harrison Pope, Leonore Terr, Ralph Underwager, Hillida Wakefield, Ethan Watters, Michael Yapko, and over 20 others.
"Lexicon of the Mouth" surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech." "Lexicon of the Mouth" aims for a viscous, poetic and resonant discourse of subjectivity, detailed through the "micro-oralities" of laughing and whispering, stuttering and reciting, eating and kissing, among others. The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination."Lexicon of the Mouth" argues for the revolutionary promise of the laugh, the spirited mythologies of the whisper, the schizophonics of self-talk, and the primal noise of gibberish, suggesting that the significance of voicing is fundamentally bound to the exertions of the mouth. Subsequently, assumptions around voice and vocality are unsettled in favor of an epistemology of the oral, highlighting the acts of the tongue, the lips and the throat as primary mediations between interior and exterior, social structures and embodied expressions. LaBelle makes a significant contribution to currents in sound and voice studies by reminding that to hear the voice, and to consider a politics of speech, is first and foremost to assume the mouth.
If the truth were told, this volume and its direct antecedents must rank among the most ambitious, if not simply pretentious, endeavors imag inable, at least in the social sciences. The titles of the volume and the chapters, promising to integrate the experiences of the sense of justice and the affectional bonding of people in close relations, seem straightforward and reasonable enough. What they fail to convey, however, is the simple bald fact that we in the human social sciences have no firm grasp on either of these two fundamental experiences-what we sometimes call "love" and "justice. " To begin with, even as "scientists" committed to under standing based upon systematic propositions linking publicly observable concepts, we have no clear consensus concerning the nature of the affec tional bonds linking people in close relationships-love, intimacy, caring, mutual responsiveness, or the sense of justice, fairness, deserving, and in our efforts to under entitlement. And we are continually handicapped stand these complex, moving experiences by the persistent tendency to reduce them to manifestations of, "nothing but," familiar psychological or even biological processes-"secondary rewards," "selfish genes. " So, why then this volume? Although there are many answers to the question, probably the most germane is that the basic issues are so im portant and intriguing that the recent past has seen rather dramatic paral lel growth in social scientists' interest in these two areas-justice and close relationships."
This volume provides an up-to-date and evaluative review of theoretical and empirical stances on emotion and its close interaction with language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Importantly, it presents a novel methodological approach that takes into account contextual information and hence goes beyond the reductionist approach to affective language that has dominated contemporary research. Owing to this pragmatic approach, the book presents brand new findings in the field of bilingualism and affect and offers the first neurocognitive interpretation of findings reported in clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism. This not only represents an invaluable contribution to the literature, but may also constitute a breakthrough in the investigation of the worldwide phenomenon of bilingualism. Beginning with a thorough review of the history and current state of affective research and its relation to language, spanning philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic perspectives, the volume then proceeds to explore affect manifestation using neuropragmatic methods in monolingual and bilingual individuals. In doing so, it brings together findings from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism with cognitive, psychophysiological and neuroimaging paradigms. By combining conceptual understanding and methodological expertise from many disciplines, this volume provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain. Thus, Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective fosters a pragmatic approach to research on affective language processing in monolingual and bilingual population, one that builds bridges across disciplines and sparks important new questions in the cognitive neuroscience of bi- and multilingualism.
In this volume specific cognitive sub-functions are identified and indications of how basic vestibular input contributes to each are described. The broad range of these functions is consistent with the broad spread of vestibular projections throughout the cortex. Combining vestibular signals about the head's orientation relative to gravity with information about head position relative to the body provides sufficient information to map body position onto the ground surface and underlie the sense of spatial position. But vestibular signals are also fundamental to sensorimotor control and even to high-level bodily perception such as the sense of body ownership and the anchoring of perspective to the body. Clinical observations confirm the essential role of vestibular signals in maintaining a coherent self-representation and suggest some novel rehabilitation strategies. The chapters presented in this volume are previously published in a Special Issue of Multisensory Research, Volume 28, Issue 5-6 (2015). Contributors are: M. Barnett-Cowan, O. Blanke, J. Blouin, G. Bosco, G. Bottini, J.-P. Bresciani, J.C. Culham, C.L. Darlington, A.W. Ellis, E.R. Ferre, M. Gandola, L. Grabherr, S. Gravano, P. Grivaz, E. Guillaud, P. Haggard, L.R. Harris, A.E.N. Hoover, I. Indovina, K. Jauregu Renaud, M. Kaliuzhna, F. Lacquaniti, B. Lenggenhager, C. Lopez, G. Macauda, V. Maffei, F.W. Mast, B. La Scaleia, B.M. Seemungal, M. Simoneau, P.F. Smith, J.C. Snow, D. Vibert, M. Zago, and Y. Zheng. |
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